Collaboration // The Visionaire x GAP ART collection features Christopher Bucklow artwork

Image: Visionaire

Artereal artist Christopher Bucklow's artwork, entitled Guest, has achieved iconic status after it was selected by GAP for use on a T-shirt as part of a limited-edition series in collaboration with art magazine Visionaire.

The limited-edition T-Shirt and sweatshirt designs will be exhibited in the GAP Lounge at contemporary art fair Frieze London through Oct.18, giving guests the opportunity to view the new designs before they are released.

The fashion brand’s partnership with the magazine is part of its 45th anniversary, and it began at Frieze New York in May this year. A special exhibit and lounge will showcase all thirty of the previously released t-shirts as well as fifteen new items screen-printed with artwork taken from past issues of Visionaire from its archives. This limited edition of 500 t-shirts and sweatshirts will be presented in a unique and interactive way, meaning rather than simply being put on display, they will be hidden behind 45 doors that guests can open to peek inside.

For more information please visit Visionaire.

SIMONE DOUGLAS EXHIBITS WORK AT PINGYAO INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL

Australian born, NYC-based artist Simone Douglas this month journeyed to the ancient town of Pingyao, located in China's world-heritage listed Shanxi provence, for the 14th annual Pingyao International Photography Festival.

Douglas, whose exhibition with British photographer Christopher Bucklow, Sun to Sun, came to a close at Artereal Gallery last Saturday, was invited to exhibit a series of her work at the internationally acclaimed festival, joining some of the world's leading international photographers, where she spoke to audiences daily about her practice.

Since its inception in 2001, the Pingyao International Photography Festival has attracted over 16 million viewers and toured to international destinations including the USA, France, Japan, Spain, India, Belgium and Australia. 

 

SUN TO SUN / CHRISTOPHER BUCKLOW AND SIMONE DOUGLAS

This September, two internationally renowned photographers; London-based Christopher Bucklow and NYC-based Simone Douglas, have come together from across continents and hemispheres to explore their shared preoccupation with the ultimate natural light source, the sun, in a new exhibition at Artereal Gallery. 

Entitled Sun to Sun, the exhibition takes the form of a visual dialogue, with the enigmatic work of Simone Douglas responding to Christopher Bucklow’s acclaimed pin-hole photographic works. Marking their very first collaborative exhibition, Sun to Sun is the culmination of decades of dialogue between the artists, not only as peers but also close friends and admirers of each other’s work. 

“When we first met in 1994, we were immediately drawn to each others work. I was profoundly mesmerized by Chris’ images and way of working with light, the sun. This exhibition is the culmination of a long conversation that has continued across countries and time zones,” said Douglas. 

As one of the leading figures of the contemporary British ‘camera-less’ photography movement, Christopher Bucklow is known for his ethereal silhouettes of radiant men and women composed of thousands of pinhole photographs of the sun. His works are held within the world’s leading public art collections including the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, amongst others.

Simone Douglas commented: “As I first came into view of Chris’s work, I was profoundly struck by the duality of the body as made by multiple suns. I had been working with the singular sun and here was this artist who had filled the body with hundreds of suns via a camera-less technique that for all intents and purposes was indexical. It was a continuation of a long held desire to ‘fall into the universe’”. 

Currently working as the Director of the MFA Fine Arts Program at Parsons The New School for Design, Douglas has been exhibiting since the late 1980s across photography, video and installation. She has exhibited at and has work held in the collections of the Victor & Albert Museum London, The Tate Modern, London The Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, amongst others. 

In her new body of work, Douglas responds to Bucklow’s work with photographs that capture fractured snapshots of natural elements, evoking both the landscape and an almost primal connection to nature. 

“In the most remote, darkest corner of our universe, there is still light. A camera is a contemporary holder of light. I use a camera at times as it enables me to hold light as it were in my hands, to shape it. A final work might involve an image made using light and the camera conduit of light,” said Douglas. 

Christopher Bucklow commented: “While there are figures in my work, to me the spaces of Simone’s work are aspects of the human too. The landscape of the Australian interior is human, it’s a metaphor for a state of mind, almost a Zen-like field of being rather than a collected ‘particle of individual consciousness.” 

“Photography, a contemporary medium of light, has been in revolution since its inception. Even before it existed, the idea of it, the holder of light, was a radical departure from the way we saw ourselves and the world around us,” said Douglas.

Sun to Sun will be on show at Artereal for the month of September, beginning 3 September and running until 4 October 2014. 

The above video documents Simone Douglas' recent Artist Talk at Artereal Gallery. Special thanks to Veronica Habib for producing this video.

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLOW / WITH A TRACE: PHOTOGRAPHS OF ABSENCE

Christopher Bucklow_Guest 6:34pm_1995_cibachrome print_99.38 x 75.25cm

With a Trace: Photographs of Absence is a group exhibition currently showing at the Akron Art Museum, Ohio, U.S.A.

Showcasing works by Christopher Bucklow, Margaret De Patta, Adam Fuss, Alison Rossiter, Minor White, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, the images in the exhibition bear traces of human presence, the transmission of energy, atmospheric phenomena and the movement of light. 

Using a wide range of processes to render their enigmatic subjects, the artists demonstrate the versatility of non-digital photography in depicting such intangibles as memory, dreams and emotion, ospheric phenomena, and experiments with light.

Christopher Bucklow's work, Guest 6:34pm, is created with exactly 25,000 pinholes, in which sunlight is used to expose the shadow of his friend onto photographic paper. Therefore, light is the medium, subject and means in the portrait, and each spot of light is a tiny image of the sun.

With a Trace: Photographs of Absence runs until 26 January 2014.

www.akronartmuseum.org

Christopher Bucklow in the UK's Guardian newspaper...

Posted by Jonathan Jones Friday 11 March 2011 15.12 GMT guardian.co.uk

Villain of the piece ... Chris Bucklow's Flatlands depicts art critic Clement Greenberg trying to push a woman into the flatness of the picture. Photograph: Chris Bucklow

Not many critics write anything that outlives their time. The exceptions deserve to be regarded as rare geniuses – the greatest example being that eminent Victorian John Ruskin, whose criticism is unrivalled as both writing and thought.

The American art critic Clement Greenberg was no Ruskin. His clipped, effective prose did not rise to those heights, nor did his ideas about art have the generous scope and grandeur of Ruskin's cultural vision. Yet Greenberg has achieved immortality of a kind. He flourished as a critic in New York from the 1940s to 1960s, but even today, decades after his best-known work and 17 years after his death, he is a totemic and constantly invoked voice on modern art. Almost all the references are critical – for his views were both extremist and at one time hugely authoritative – but there's no doubt they keep old Clem alive in the mind.

The other day I came up against his infamy in – of all places – a pub in Bath. I was having a drink with the painter Chris Bucklow, who shows with Riflemaker gallery in London while living and working in the south-west. Bucklow showed me one of his latest works – a photo of a huge painting, widescreen like an epic American abstraction, at the centre of which is a man wrestling a woman. Bucklow explained that the man in a suit is Greenberg. He is trying to compress the woman, squeeze her into the flatness of the picture plane, while on the walls around them hang late modernist abstractions that Greenberg once heralded as the future of art.

Greenberg's belief in flatness was at the heart of an evangelical praise for American abstract painting in the middle of the 20th century. As a critic, he championed Jackson Pollock. As an intellectual, he argued that pure abstract painting was the logical and necessary conclusion of modern art. The whole tendency of serious modernism, he claimed, was to strip various art forms down and reduce them to a philosophical core of truth. In the case of painting, this meant escaping bourgeois fantasies of perspective and recognising that painting's reality is that of a flat object; a surface. According to this theory, Pollock – whose paintings are planes of colour – stands as a metaphysical revealer of what painting truly is.

Bucklow's portrait of Greenberg shares the belief of critics such as Rosalind Krauss that Greenberg's cult of the pure modern work of art excluded irrationality, physicality, sexuality and the mess of life. His Greenberg is a gothic villain attempting to push a woman out of this dimension into flatland. Being remembered as an oppressor years after your death may not be everyone's idea of immortality – but perhaps it is the only kind art critics can achieve.

Christopher Bucklow: Snapshots from New York...

Artereal artist Simone Douglas who is based in New York has been kind enough to send us some photographs from Christopher Bucklow's recent solo exhibition at New York gallery Danziger Projects. For those who could not see this exhibition in person, the photographs below provide a snapshot of what you have missed out on.

An image from this exhibition is also currently featured on the cover of the latest issue of U.S. Photograph magazine.

Artereal artist Simone Douglas with Chrisopher Bucklow.

Chrisopher Bucklow exhibiton at Danziger Projects, New York.

Cover of the current issue of American magazine Photograph.

Christopher Bucklow is a prominent English artist who works in various mediums and has been exhibiting internationally since 1996, with dozens of solo and group exhibitions to his credit at such prestigious venues as the Photographers’ Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, amongst others.

Director of Danziger Projects, James Danziger says "Bucklow's work is one of the pillars of the British "cameraless" photography movement... his explorations into avoiding the negative are both literal and figurative, connecting light and art, with the Other."

Christopher Bucklow's exhibition at Danziger Projects runs until the 23 October, 2010.

Christopher Bucklow is represented in Sydney by Artereal Gallery.

Christopher Bucklow exhibition opens at Danziger Projects in New York...

Christopher Bucklow, Guest 12.34pm 31.5.05,

2005, Unique edition pin hole photograph, 99 x 74cm

An exhibition of new works by London based photographer Christopher Bucklow has just opened at Danziger Projects in New York.

Bucklow is a prominent English artist who works in various mediums and has been exhibiting internationally since 1996, with dozens of solo and group exhibitions to his credit at such prestigious venues as the Photographers’ Gallery in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, amongst others.

Director of Danziger Projects, James Danziger says "Bucklow's work is one of the pillars of the British "cameraless" photography movement... his explorations into avoiding the negative are both literal and figurative, connecting light and art, with the Other."

Christopher Bucklow's exhibition at Danziger Projects runs until the 23 October, 2010. 

Christopher Bucklow is represented in Sydney by Artereal Gallery.